[Solved] $LANG and zsh prompt color problems

Question

Hi,
I recently discovered, trying to use Newsbeuter, that, in X, certain parts of my profile aren't set. Until now it only seemed to be $LANG, which is empty if I echo it from urxvt in XMonad, but yields the correct setting if I do the same in a tty.
To make things worse now, my zsh seems to be acting up. I have differently colored prompts for my normal user and root. But since a few days ago, the root colors aren't applied unless I source .zshrc again after sudo-ing.
I updated a lot recently and it's gotten hard to track these issues, especially the $LANG one, to a specific update. The only thing I know is that my desktop, running Kdemod, doesn't have these problems.
I'm using Slim and XMonad. Neither issue is limited to a certain terminal.
Most of my configs can be found in my GitHub dotfiles repository. If anything's missing to get a clear picture, ask for it.
My rc.conf can be found here [Gist].
Last edited by count-corrupt (2010-08-22 13:33:06)

Answer 1

jac wrote:
I finally went through the new sudoers file and got mine to work, see this thread for details. Using that, and using a workaround for libetc, your prompt works for me.
You appear not to use libetc, but if you do and don't also have root set up to use libetc, you will need to create a link to/from ~/.zshrc from/to ~/.config/zshrc
I actually just solved it in another way. Your original point, that sudo changed it's default behavior was the key. In the official zsh documentation somewhere it says that all settings that are wanted for root should be put into /root/.zshrc. I just did that and it works.
Your solution works too by the way. Just enabling
Defaults env_keep += "HOME"
does the trick and also (logically) re-enables other things that I hadn't even realized were gone yet like syntax highlighting in vim. I guess I should read into the nature of said privilige escalation problems. Maybe there's a way to selectively keep parts of HOME.
So thank you very much for the help.